


evaporation

by seventhstar



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Zexal
Genre: Angst, Gen, I am so sorry, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-14
Updated: 2015-02-14
Packaged: 2018-03-12 07:55:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3349505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seventhstar/pseuds/seventhstar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Rio falls asleep, Ryoga is there — but when she wakes, he is gone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	evaporation

The door slammed as Ryoga and Yuuma came into the house. Rio could hear them from her room as they talked — Yuuma’s voice animated, her brother’s responses more subdued — and she listened as they moved down the hallway, away from her, until Ryoga’s door shut behind them and left her in silence.

She pulled the pillow over her face and went back to sleep.

She woke to Durbe shaking her.

 

“Merag,” he was saying. “Merag, Nasch is missing.”

“What?”

She scrambled out of bed and out of the room.

The photograph of the six of them in the hallway now showed five.

Ryoga was not in it, and Rio touched her own unsmiling face in the picture before going into his room.

But it was not his room. The bed where Ryoga had lain was gone, replaced with a treadmill and a rack of weights and three rolled up yoga mats. The shark rug Ryoga had spent three weeks searching for was gone. The closet held no clothes, no dueling equipment, no hidden altars from the Poseidon Lands, just a case of bottled water and half a box of granola bars.

She scoured the floor, the walls, the rest of the apartment — the kitchen was unrecognizable without Ryoga’s cooking or his groceries or his obsession with clean counters — for some trace that he had lived here.

There was nothing. And she had known that there wouldn’t be when she first met Durbe’s eyes and he told her that Ryoga was gone.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know.” Durbe shook his head. “The others are out looking, but…”

“Yuuma — we need to talk to Yuuma.” He had been the last person to see Ryoga. She fumbled for her phone.

“Merag, don’t —” Durbe reached for her hands, but she batted him away and held the phone to her ear.

“Hello? Yuuma?” She barely listened to his confused response. “Have you seen Ryoga?”

“…who’s Ryoga?”

There was a clatter, and a crack, and the temperature of the room dropped ten degrees. There was the tinny sound of Yuuma’s voice, questioning, but Rio did not listen. The phone lay broken on the floor.

Her body moved on its own, without any input from her reeling mind. “Get your coat. We’re going.”

Durbe followed her without a word.

+++++

_“Ryoga. Ryoga Kamishiro. Purple hair, blue eyes — don’t you remember?”_

_Rio held her breath. Yuuma answered._

_“No…”_

+++++

Mizael didn’t come back that night.

None of them had seen anything during their fruitless search for Ryoga. Durbe ducked into his and Mizael’s room, and when he came back he was white with fear. He didn’t have to speak; Rio held his hand while she called Yuuma, and listened to his bleary “Mizael? What?”, and sat there with him until the sun rose again.

+++++

_“Was I his friend?”_

_Yuuma sounded wistful._

_“Yes…something like that.”_

+++++

The four of them tried to stay together the next day as they searched the city for some sign. They stalked through the streets like predators; Rio was aware of how palpable her desperation was by the way no one would meet her eyes.

Heartland seemed unmoved and unfamiliar to her. It seemed that the world should have stopped spinning, and the sun should have stopped burning, and instead the city looked as it always had, except for the tiny nuances — a missing line on the subway, a changed street name — as if the Barians had had no more effect on it than a drop of rain did on the ocean.

Alit was behind her one moment, asking her a question. She turned to answer him, and there was nothing but her shadow on the ground.

+++++

_“He sounds pretty cool.” Yuuma hesitated. “I’m really sorry I don’t remember.”_

_“It’s alright. He’d have forgiven you.”_

_Ryoga would have. Rio won’t._

+++++

“Who is Alit?” Yuuma asked. “Rio, are you okay?”

Rio hung up on him. Gilag looked pinched and tense, and Durbe’s face was entirely blank. She could still rely on Gilag, she thought; he was logical, and patient. He would work with her for a solution.

Durbe, on the other hand…he was here physically, but she was terrified that he might already be gone. He wasn’t coping well.

She was holding onto his hand so hard her fingers ached.

“Rio?” Yuuma asked.

“We should try leaving the city. Maybe it’s local,” Gilag said.

“Yuuma, Gilag and Durbe and I are leaving town.”

“Gilag?”

The phone crumpled in her grip, the casing snapping into pieces. She and Durbe stared at the space where Gilag had been.

Rio snatched up the keys on the counter. She didn’t know whose they were, or where they had come from, in this apartment that was slowly being stripped of all the trappings that had made it home.

She dragged Durbe out the door with her.

+++++

_“And you’re sure? You don’t remember anything?”_

_“I’m sure. Rio, are you —”_

+++++

She pounded on the door until it opened, revealing Yuuma still in his pajamas.

“Durbe is gone,” she said, and when he said “Come in,” she knew it was over.

Yuuma had forgotten him too.

Durbe was not coming back.

“…I’m next.” To say it aloud felt like a defeat. Rio closed her eyes for a moment, and then made herself open them. She didn’t not know how much time there was left.

“Yeah.”

She sat there on the sofa, in Yuuma’a empty living room. Nothing seemed real.

“…I should go.” She started to stand up. “I don’t know how much longer I have, and I have — I have things I should do.”

She could not have told him what it is she had to do, if he had asked; she only knew that sitting here, waiting for the axe to fall while she fell apart inside, would be the worst possible end. She wanted to move.

“You’ve probably got about an hour,” Yuuma said distantly. He turned to go back into the kitchen as the kettle whistled.

Rio clamped her hand over her mouth. She had heard him wrong. _She had heard him wrong._

“You told me you didn’t remember.” She stared at him — Yuuma, with the power of the Numeron Code, Yuuma the hero, Yuuma who she had trusted, Yuuma who everyone had trusted — and he met her eyes. His expression was flat. She was aware that her voice was breaking, but she couldn’t stop talking. “You lied to me — you told me you didn’t know what was happening — you told me I was the only one who remembered, you bastard, how could you —”

“You would have tried to stop it,” he whispered. His gaze drifted, like he were staring out into space somewhere, seeing something that wasn’t really there.

“Could I have?”

His silence was all the answer she needed.

“I could have saved them.”

“It would have destroyed everything. Maybe not right now, but Don Thousand would have come back, and he would have killed everyone.” He sounded unlike himself. No, Rio thought, he sounded like Astral.

“But…” She sucked in a breath. Her chest ached. “Ryoga wasn’t corrupted by Don Thousand…even him, you…” _He loved you,_ she didn’t say out loud, because of course Yuuma had known. She had seen them together, only a week ago — had it only been a week ago that she’d had a brother — and they had been happy.

Yuuma’s expression crumpled. Tears rolled down his cheeks, and he reached for her. She stepped back; nothing was more revolting to her in this moment than Yuuma’s grief.

“I asked him to stay with me,” he said. “I asked him, but…he wanted to be with you guys…”

“We’re not going to be anywhere. We don’t exist! We never existed!” She sounded hysterical, she realized, but the ice in her had melted, and there was nothing left but tears, nothing left but to drown.

“You were suppose to die the first time!” Yuuma yelled, so loudly Rio jumped. “You were supposed to be dead, and I tried to keep you alive but I couldn’t, I couldn’t, it was — I had to do it —” He covered his face with his hands. “I had to let you go.”

The silence lay heavily between them. They were both crying, and she wiped furiously at her eyes, hating herself for this weakness, and wished desperately she could work up the wrath to attack him. Maybe killing Yuuma would keep her alive.

But god, what was the point of continuing to live in this world? Everything she had loved was gone, taken, unmade. Ryoga was gone. Her stars had gone out.

She looked down at her hands — and then through them. They were flickering, the floor visible through her flesh, and the room was getting colder, and she could feel something, a lightness…

“I’m sorry,” Yuuma said.

“You were stalling me.” Her hands were getting fainter. _So much for that hour,_ she thought.

Rio had died before. She had drowned once, sucking in water until she blacked out. This was worse, because she knew she ought to be furious, desperate, clawing at life, and yet she felt nothing. She was unraveling while Yuuma watched tearfully, and she couldn’t bring herself to move, or care.

She missed Ryoga.

Yuuma flung himself at her, and she couldn’t dodge, and his skin was too hot, and there was hardly enough of her left to hold. But he hugged her just the same, and he looked her in the eyes, and he whispered to her while she faded away.

“I’ll remember all of you,” he said.

Rio didn’t believe him. She opened her mouth to tell him so, but nothing came out —


End file.
